Roy Bahat talks with Kelsey Shwetz, a painter, and a professor at Columbia and Pratt, about what it's actually like to be an artist.

She traces her own path from Winnipeg to nearly becoming a psychologist, to the moment she decided to tell everyone she was a painter – and never looked back. Kelsey shares the parts most people don't see: how a painting actually starts, why she stages photo shoots with glass fruit and Zelda-screen composites, and what it means when a painting is "misbehaving." She talks art vs. commerce, how gallery relationships really form, and why pricing by square inch is actually liberating. The conversation goes deep on the inner life too: impostor syndrome, the paralysis of making work that might be seen, and why talking to friends beats therapy. And they close on what AI might mean for fine art, drawing a historical lesson from French Impressionism.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Preview

00:03:20 – Becoming an artist in the first place

00:17:54 – Developing ideas

00:36:15 – Making the work

01:02:59 – Selling the work

01:17:21 – Communicating about yourself and the work

01:24:15 – Progressing in your career

01:43:14 – Understanding and improving "the system"

01:50:10 – What should someone considering entering the occupation do?

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